


White Lies

by thirty2flavors



Series: in absentia [3]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Missing Scene, Presumed character death, mid-episode 5, rhys does not actually appear but is featured heavily anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 17:31:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13575501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirty2flavors/pseuds/thirty2flavors
Summary: They’ve never had the easiest of friendships, her and Vaughn; Vaughn’s too likely to keep to himself, and Yvette is all too happy to let him, to keep things nice and safe and arm’s length. It’s different without Rhys bulldozing through awkward silences and dragging them along in his wake.//After the Helios crash, Yvette and Vaughn rebuild.





	White Lies

**Author's Note:**

> The Yvette here is intended to be the same as the Yvette from [Symbiosis](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11700927), the Yvette-focused gen piece I wrote a while ago to work out some of my thoughts on the character. But you probably don't really need to read that to follow this.

Yvette’s first few seconds on Pandora are exactly as bad as she always imagined they’d be. 

She breaks a heel kicking her way out of her escape pod. Smoke billows from the rubble all around her, stinging her eyes and lungs. There’s a persistent ring in her ears from the sound of the impact, and her head still hurts from being clocked by that woman in the hat. 

Still, a broken shoe is preferable to being barefoot in so much rock and broken glass. Being alive and in one piece puts her in the lucky percentile.

She claws her way up a bank of dirt, away from the worst of the smoke, trying to get her bearings. Not that she’d know where she is, anyway. She’s never been to Pandora before. Never wanted to. Who in their right mind would?

Blinking the sand from her eyes, she leans against a boulder, surveying the damage. The wreck of Helios is scattered as far as she can see, distant points of smoke and fire dotted in every direction. Voices yell in the distance, but the space around her is eerily quiet. Debris lights up the sky as it disintegrates in the atmosphere, a meteor shower made of the fragments of Yvette’s life. Equal parts beautiful and macabre. 

For the first time, Yvette isn’t sure where to go, or what to do next. 

She sits for a moment, watching the shooting stars, then picks a random direction to walk in.

——

Ideally, she wants to get away. But there’s no shelter she can see for miles, she has no supplies, and somewhere in the dark horizon are all the other Pandoran threats she’s heard about—strange creatures and bandits and God knows what else.

So she sticks close to Helios, like she’s always done. 

She swaps her broken heels for a pair of boots she lifts from someone whose crash landing did not go as smoothly as hers. She picks up a gun, too, just in case, and distracts herself by mentally reciting its specs as she picks her way through the ruins. 

Forty-five minutes pass, or maybe an hour. It’s hard to keep track, and it wouldn’t matter if she could. Her skirt is ripped, a run in her pantyhose stretches all the way to her thigh, and she’s sure she’ll never feel clean again, and then—

“Holy crap,” comes a voice, and she freezes, her hand on the hilt of her stolen gun. “Yvette?”

Vaughn’s on her before she can react, crushing her in a hug that throws her off-balance and leaves her already-sore body aching in protest. 

“Hi, Vaughn,” she manages through the shock, her arms trapped under his. Has he always been this strong?

“Holy crap,” he repeats, still squashed up against her. “Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re okay.” He steps back, but not far, both hands clutching her upper arms. “No offense, but I definitely thought I was never gonna see you again.”

“Likewise,” Yvette hears herself say, but her own voice sounds quiet and far away and it’s lost in the tide of Vaughn’s nervous babble.

“I mean, I already thought—you know—and then I saw Helios go down—holy _shit_ —and then—like, statistically, the odds of me finding you are like, terrible, so…” He breaks for a breath, pushing the bridge of his glasses further up his nose and rests his hands on his hips. “Holy crap.”

“Yeah,” Yvette agrees, feeling breathless herself.

She knows what Vaughn’s next question will be before he’s even opened his mouth.

“Where’s Rhys?”

——

She tells Vaughn about Jack, about the power core failure and the mad rush to evacuate. She doesn’t tell Vaughn about the deal she made with Vasquez. 

Later, she thinks. Not now. Not yet. Not like this.

“There was only one escape pod left,” she explains, sitting on a rock while Vaughn listens anxiously. “Rhys told me to take it. I… didn’t argue.”

She should have, probably. It would have been the right thing to do. The fair thing. Noble and just.

Yvette has never valued nobility over survival. Not many at Hyperion do.

Vaughn says nothing in judgment of her cowardice, but the worry on his face makes her itch, so she adds, “You know Rhys, though. He’ll have cooked up some crazy scheme. And the loader was still with him. He’ll be okay.”

It’s a hollow reassurance, and they both know it, but Vaughn nods anyway. 

“Yeah,” he says, sounding less confident than he looks. “Yeah.” 

He turns away from her, ostensibly to survey the crash site, but more likely to hide his face. A gentler person would reach out, she thinks. Touch his shoulder. Comfort him.

Yvette keeps her hands folded tightly together in her lap. 

“What do we do now?” she asks, when the silence is too much. 

“I dunno,” says Vaughn. “I... guess we just keep looking. I think… Hey, is that guy eating dirt?” 

——

If it were up to Yvette, they’d leave the idiots to themselves and let them eat dirt. But Vaughn wants to help—he insists. Pandora’s a weird place, he says. It’s not like Hyperion. There’s safety in numbers. You need people watching your back. 

Privately, she suspects he just wants to look for Rhys.

Still, she’s not about to venture into the badlands herself, so she tags along, collecting strangers like herding cats. By the time they stop for the night in the hollowed-out hunk of what used to be a cafeteria, they number over a dozen. 

Yvette settles as far from the rest of them as she can. Vaughn sticks close to her, drifting to sleep with his head against her arm. Yvette lies awake much longer, waiting for anything to feel real. 

——

The days accumulate, and so do the survivors. None of them are Rhys.

Mercifully, there’s too much chaos to spend time on worry or grief. 

Or guilt.

Keeping the group from descending into full-fledged panic is a full-time job. To her own surprise, it’s Vaughn who rises to the occasion.

She’s never known Vaughn to be a natural leader, but everything’s topsy-turvy on Pandora, and his week of experience makes him the most qualified person around. The people they meet hang off his every word. They even seem to trust him, a feat on its own. It’s a weird twist of fate for a man whose success in the company had relied on his ability to slip under the radar. 

Yvette knows better than to say so, but being out from under Rhys’ shadow might be doing Vaughn some good.

——

Everyone agrees that refashioning the ruins into something livable is a better plan than strolling into the nearest Pandoran town in Hyperion-brand clothing. So they get to work.

After years in requisitions, Yvette knows Hyperion’s product line inside-out. Meticulous and organized, she maintains a running inventory: what they have, what they need, where they might be able to find it. What bits of tech can be stripped down and repurposed, which parts of the station they were stored in. 

Helios wasn’t only code monkeys and pencil pushers. There are engineers and mechanics, grunts and medics. She assembles them into scavenging teams and shifts, a desperately-needed sense of structure among the aftermath. 

She’d have made a damn fine CEO, she thinks. Not that it ever mattered.

—-

It’s not that she likes lying to Vaughn. It’s just that the truth isn’t sensible right now.

It’s hard enough, orchestrating a giant group of survivors in a burnt-out space station on a planet that seems designed to kill. There are so many things to do, so many things in need of attention. Digging up past mistakes is a poor use of time. It’s meaningless now, anyway. Over with. Done and dusted.

And… well, maybe she’s not entirely sure how he’d react. She has to think of herself, too. Frustrating though the self-styled “Children of Helios” might be, it isn’t as though Yvette can afford to be out on her own.

She’ll come clean about all of it when they find Rhys. Until then, she keeps it to herself, one secret clutched tight among a dozen others. 

——

In spare moments, Vaughn fills her in on what she’d missed on Pandora: the fake Vault key, the con artists, the Gortys project, the clusterfuck of an idea to rob Handsome Jack’s office. 

If it were Rhys telling the story, she wouldn’t believe half of it.

“I was supposed to be the hostage,” Vaughn tells her one night, when they’re counting through rations. “I ran away. Figured it’d take away their leverage, you know?” He shrugs. “I guess it didn’t really help.” 

Yvette says nothing, but she peeks over the pile of dehydrated meal packs to look at him. Vaughn keeps his eyes down as he works, but she recognizes the melancholy in the lines of his face. Somewhere along the way, he’s stopped wearing his glasses. 

“I called Rhys,” he carries on after a moment, “when they were all up there. The connection was terrible. We got cut off. I’m not even sure he heard me.” 

Vaughn stops short before he says what Yvette knows he must be thinking: what if that broken call was the last time he’d ever speak to his best friend?

Yvette’s not sure what to say to that, so she presses her lips together in a frown. They’ve never had the easiest of friendships, her and Vaughn; Vaughn’s too likely to keep to himself, and Yvette is all too happy to let him, to keep things nice and safe and arm’s length. It’s different without Rhys bulldozing through awkward silences and dragging them along in his wake.

As it often does these days, Yvette’s stomach feels hollow.

“You think he’s okay?” Vaughn asks, quiet and controlled, still watching what he’s doing. 

Lying has always come naturally to Yvette. She hesitates, weighs her options.

“I don’t know,” she says honestly.

——

Yvette is on a scavenging trip with a woman named May when they find the remains of Handsome Jack’s office.

Yvette’s never seen the place herself before—never shared Rhys’ fascination—but it’s unmistakable anyway, with giant toppled statues and nicer furniture than anywhere else on the station. She stoops to inspect what looks like a trophy case (of course it’s a trophy case) when she hears May cry out.

“Oh, _gross_!” May’s voice carries, and Yvette rolls her eyes; discreteness is key, they’ve been over this a billion times. “That is so… how in the _hell_?”

The reprimand dies in Yvette’s throat as she climbs the stairs and sees what May is looking at.

“That is an arm,” says May, totally redundantly, as she shakes her head in disgust.

“It’s the Hyperion Data-Slicer,” says Yvette. “Third generation.” She gravitates towards it, drawn by an invisible force. 

“It’s an _arm_ ,” May repeats. “And is that… blood? Ugh, God, that is _so_ gross. How does that even happen? Where’s… the rest of it?”

 _The rest of it._ Yvette almost laughs. She feels suddenly as if she is very far away from herself. 

“The connecting wires are shot and the upper portion’s impaled, but the palm looks okay,” she hears herself say. “Might still have some working parts.”

“Ew, really? I mean, it’s all bloodied and—”

“I’ll deal with it.” Short and professional. Right in Yvette’s wheelhouse. She smooths her palms down her skirt and turns to May. “Go check in with the other team.” When May hasn’t moved, Yvette narrows her eyes. “Go!”

May scrambles away without another word.

——

The arm is not Rhys. 

It is an expensive piece of equipment, no more or less. Separated from its operator, it can accomplish nothing. 

She should strip it down. There’s valuable material inside, wiring and chips and electronics they could make use of back at the base. Only sentiment stands in the way, and sentiment is stupid. Sentiment runs counter to survival. Yvette has always known that. 

Still, as Yvette stares at it, she thinks of other things. She remembers how many times it has clapped her on the shoulder, handed her a drink, gestured in support of some grand story. She remembers the weeks and months spent scheming, the backdoor deals and backstabs, the late nights to facilitate a bonus to facilitate _this_ : a broken hunk of metal, no more meaningful than a shattered monitor.

When Rhys first got his implants, Vaughn took a whole week off work to help him recover.

She decides not to tell Vaughn about this either. It’s another question mark, not a period, and Vaughn already has plenty of those.

Besides, the arm is not Rhys. It is not even dead, because it was never alive to begin with. 

She leaves the arm intact and buries it in the dirt, unmarked. 

——

Vaughn blindsides her one night when she’s having a drink.

“Hey Yvette? Can I talk to you? Uh… privately?”

Yvette looks up from her shitty Pandoran coffee, both eyebrows raised. The anxiety etched on his face makes her own nerves prickle. What’s gone wrong now? 

“Of course.” She finishes off the coffee in a single swig and follows him to his room, her mind itemizing every potential catastrophe he might want to discuss. 

There’s trouble with roving bandits, sometimes. The compound could be better defended. They need to solidify some trade partnerships with nearby settlements. Or maybe it’s internal politics. The weird fucking cult-worship springing up around them, from people who—

“So.” Vaughn shuts the door behind her, and then starts pacing. “I should have told you this earlier, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry, I mean—I wanted to, but—”

Vaughn stares at the ground as he rambles, gesturing nervously as he paces. For such a familiar sight, it feels jarring. She’s grown accustomed to Vaughn’s new look, had watched as bit by bit the Hyperion corporate accountant was chipped away and replaced by someone stronger, bolder. This feels eerily like a flashback.

“Vaughn,” she interrupts, calm and firm. “What is it?”

“Right.” He stops pacing, even looks her in the eyes, though he fidgets. “So. Um. Way back when Rhys and I first came to Pandora—”

Yvette can’t help the expression of surprise. “What?” 

“—first night, I think, Vasquez called me. Offered me immunity if I pinned everything on Rhys. I, uh—I said yes.” He’s talking in a rush now, looking at Yvette without really seeing her. “I wasn’t really—I wouldn’t—I just thought, you know, if I told him what he wanted to hear it might buy some time, you know? I wouldn’t have...”

He trails off, pained and desperate. Yvette’s eyebrows creep further and further up her forehead. “That’s… what you wanted to tell me?” 

“Yeah.” He’s still wringing his hands when he meets her eyes again. 

“I don’t see why—” she starts, but he carries on as if she’d said nothing. 

“I know, I know, I should’ve said something earlier, but—”

“No, I mean… that was ages ago. Why bring it up now?” 

“I dunno.” Vaughn shrugs like he doesn’t understand the question. “Felt… like something you should know?” But there’s something else. He hesitates. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It probably didn’t mean anything in the long run, but…” He takes a breath. “Turned out he offered Rhys the same deal. Rhys said no. Of course. Made me feel like an asshole.” Vaughn laughs, more anxious than amused. “He wasn’t even that angry about it, which… kinda just made me feel more like an asshole.” 

“Oh,” says Yvette. But she understands now, more than Vaughn realizes. “Well. That’s…” Her fist clenches and unclenches at her side before she finds what she wants to say. “Rhys was never as good at playing the game as he likes to think.” She pins a smile into place, tight and practiced. “Wouldn’t have lasted two months at Hyperion without us.” 

“No,” Vaughn agrees. “Probably not.” His answering smile is sad. “He was pretty good at being a friend, though.”

The 'was' rings out like a shot; it’s the first time Vaughn has used past tense.

“Yes.” She clamps down like a vice on the memories struggling to the surface. “He was.”

Vaughn deflates with a long, slow sigh, the nervous energy dissipating in a wave of defeat. He sinks onto the edge of his bed, staring at the floor, and Yvette stands stock-straight at the doorway, fists balled at her sides.

“Sorry,” says Vaughn, “I know you hate all this emotional crap. I just…” He looks up for a second, hand frozen mid-gesture like he’s waiting for the words to come. “I wanted…”

“No, it’s fine,” she says quickly, to stop the train of thought as much as to reassure him. She should not be here, she thinks. She is not the right person for this job. “I get it, it’s—”

“Felt like I should be honest, you know? Hyperion always meant so much lying. I don’t wanna do that anymore. I want it to be different here. Right?” 

Yvette’s once-manicured nails dig into the heels of her palms. 

Vaughn doesn’t know what he’s asking for. Honesty is a dangerous weapon. Yvette feels responsible for wielding it carefully.

She forces herself to nod. “Right.” 

The voice hardly sounds like her own, but Vaughn doesn’t notice. He hides his face in his hands. Then he makes a noise that sounds like a sob, and Yvette freezes. Every ounce of her self-preservation and instinct wants to leave the room. She’s never been good at this part of friendship, the raw, vulnerable bits. 

Rhys was. 

But Rhys isn’t here now. That’s her fault, at least in part. A consequence of her own survival. 

The worst part of it all is that she knows she’d do it again.

Yvette takes a deep, steadying breath and crosses the room. 

“Vaughn.” She sits down beside him and lets one hand rest on his back, right between his shoulder blades. “Vaughn, it’s okay.” Another lie added to the tally. 

Vaughn sniffs, but he nods, leaning to the side to rest against her. “Yeah. I just...” He swipes at his eyes before he takes his hand away. “I really miss him.”

“I know.” Yvette focuses on rubbing circles on his back, and not on the lump in her throat or the fog in her vision. She decides to be honest, for once. “So do I.” 

Vaughn bumps his knee against hers. 

“Glad you’re here, though,” he adds, and Yvette says nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really interested in that big episode 5 timegap where the group is all scattered, and for a while I've wanted to write companion pieces to the Sasha and Fiona fics I already wrote, but couldn't find an angle for Vaughn... and then realized my angle was Yvette. So here we are. 
> 
> Last piece of the puzzle will be Rhys.
> 
> Come say hi on Tumblr: [@oodlyenough](http://oodlyenough.tumblr.com/)
> 
>  **Edit** : also please go enjoy this [SWEET ART](https://dracene.tumblr.com/post/170546654865/a-scene-from-white-lies-by-oodlyenough-which-you) by Dracene to go with this fic, because it is beautiful.


End file.
